Political Pastors’ Speech Is Free but Not Tax-Exempt

Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The line between religious belief and
political action is often indistinct. But pastors demanding
government tax preferences for political crusades have clearly
crossed it.

We will see a brazen example of this Oct. 7, when the
organizers of “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” seek “to restore a
pastor’s right to speak freely from the pulpit without fearing
government censorship or control.”

The plan is for pastors to make explicit candidate
endorsements in their churches, tape the endorsements and send
the incriminating evidence to the Internal Revenue Service. They
are daring the federal government to sue them for violating a
long-established rule that restricts churches and other
organizations that benefit from tax-deductible charitable
donations from engaging in partisan politics.

Apparently, though, this is a battle the federal government
would like to avoid. Sunday’s protest will mark the fifth
consecutive year of defiance, yet the government has taken no
action against pastors.

“No pastor has been punished or threatened with punishment
by the IRS for participating in Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” wrote
Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defending
Freedom, a conservative group backing the protest.

And that, Stanley told FoxNews.com last week, is precisely
the problem. “We’re hoping the IRS will respond by doing what
they have threatened,” he said. “We have to wait for it to be
applied to a particular church or pastor so that we can
challenge it in court. We don’t think it’s going to take long
for a judge to strike this down as unconstitutional.”

Stanley might be surprised. This is not a battle for free
speech -- in the pulpit or out. It’s a test of whether Americans
are willing to allow a taxpayer subsidy to be used for partisan
political activity.

The law provides every church a double benefit: It allows
congregants to make tax-deductible donations to the church, and
it frees the church from paying taxes on its income and
holdings, including land. The law states that those exemptions
apply as long as a church “does not participate in, or intervene
in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any
political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any
candidate for political office.”

In effect, what the law cannot abide is political actors
claiming religious tax benefits.

There is no shortage of political speech in the U.S. If
pastors wish to jump into the political fray and openly endorse
candidates, they are welcome to do so. Some among their ranks
have done all that and more. But to expect fellow citizens to
subsidize those activities is a bit much.

According to the Alliance Defending Freedom, participation
in Pulpit Freedom Sunday has grown from 33 pastors in 2008 to
539 in 2011. In a country with about 345,000 religious
congregations, that tally hardly suggests a national phenomenon.
So it’s perhaps understandable if the IRS exercises restraint in
the hope the protests fade.

But it may be necessary, before long, for the IRS to
provide the pulpit protesters with the legal confrontation they
so desperately seek, if only to underscore a basic point: The
freedom of religion the pastors have and the public subsidy of
politics they desire are not the same.